Building a Model
Forword There are certain methods and procedures that are outside the scope of this manual, learning how to build a low-poly game model in MAX is just one of these procedures, however, some notes on building a character model are contained below. Introduction This tutorial or rather series of Articles will document my Attempt to design a creature from scratch and get it into Alice as a fully working monster. In fact this is a new genre of tutorial, like a Docusoap this is a Journorial because I'm making it up as I go along! "Well who is this guy to write a tutorial about something he hasn't done before?" I hear you think (oooohh aaaahhh... spooky music, no, okay!) well there is no tutorial on this subject and where would we be as a species if we didn't try stuff that hadn't been tried? We're going to build a Tove, well I'm going to build a Tove, you'll probably read this, learn from my mistakes and make another creature/character substituting all my Tove related bits for bits that apply to your monster/baddie! Okay, so what is a Tove... For those of you not familiar with "Through the Looking Glass" (shock, horror, oh the humanity!) a Tove is a creature mentioned in the poem Jabberwocky: "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe..." I shan't translate that here but Lewis Carroll did go a fair way to explaining a Tove. The first stanza of Jabberwocky first appeared in 1855 ("Through the Looking Glass" wasn't published until 1871) along with this description of a Tove: "TOVE. A species of Badger. They had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag: lived chiefly on cheese." But this is not exactly the explanation that Humpty Dumpty gives to Alice later on in "Through the Looking Glass". Humpty says: "Well, 'toves' are something like badgers--they're something like lizards--and they're something like corkscrews." We later find out that Humpty is extremely eccentric and has a bit of a fixation with corkscrews and so this description may well be flawed but never the less Wonderland is Alice's mind and if that's what she thinks they look like then that's what they look like!! In my opinion the perfect melding of all these characteristics is shown in Sir John Tenniel's accompanying illustration. So what we're looking at is the front end of a badger with a long curly nose and the back end of a lizard with a curly tail. That's what I'm going for. The first step in building a 3D model differs from modeler to modeler I myself sometimes totally bypass the concept and reference drawing stage and go straight to building a model, that's fine if your sure you can get the right result straight off or if you don't have a firm idea of what you want and are willing to see where the modelling process takes you. In this case we have a very clear idea of what we want... we want a Tove and considering this whole project is extremely experimental I'm at least going to start doing this properly. Stage 1: Conceptualisation This stage is made all the easier by the fact that we have a picture to roughly aim for, in fact the conceptualisation is done to be honest but we still need to produce our reference drawings. Reference drawings are drawings done in primarily portrait, profile and plan although some use fewer and some use more, for figure modelling some use 18 separate drawing for the torso and more for the head hands and feet. I think we'll start with one. To make this process easier I suggest collecting as many pictures of, or that could be adapted to represent, the various parts of your animal/person. We could refer to these as "reference reference pictures" but I think "pictures" will suffice. Use any pictures you can get your hands on but if you prefer not to break character by leaving the house, room, desk or even glance away from your screen for one second then Google Image Search is very handy as well as Photodisc which has the advantage of a very powerful search facility. So on to the drawing! I wouldn't recommend trying to do a bipedal character with just one drawing but as a Tove is a long thin animal I think I can get away with it! When drawing a beast of any kind I like to start with drawing a rough skeleton to get the posture and proportion right before fleshing it out so to speak. If your a bit of a crap/slow sketcher like I am then this stage can be invaluable. As you can see I've gone for a slightly longer necked squater bodied looking beast than Tenniels. The nose and tale will be made using a different technique than the rest of the body and hence there's no point drawing them in. In truth I'm not quite sure whether shading your sketch is the best idea or not but curiosity got the better of me. To be honest I don't feel qualified to provide any more information on drawing without risking false profit status so on to the next round I feel. Stage 2: Modelling Hooray now here's the meat and two veg! make those veggies the non starchy kind for all you Atkins followers out there and the meat low fat/non animal for all you non-Atkins/vegetarians and quite frankly enough with all this nonsense! So today I'll be using 3DS MAX - yes I know it's about the most expensive piece of software in existence (actually it's nowhere close but its still pricey) but this is what the FAKK Tools are meant for. Unfortunately I must now cite the ol' tutorial cliche that is "This tutorial does not seek to teach you how to use 3DS MAX" or if you like "A basic understanding of 3DS MAX is assumed" but I guess what I really mean is "I don't care if you've never used this software before in your life, that's cool and now's a good a time as any. If I mention something that your unfamiliar with just look it up!" If you don't have the FAKK Tools then hop on over to the "Tools" page and download them, you will need them. So first lets get our reference sketch into our viewport: Load up the appropriate picture for the viewport and choose Match Bitmap and Lock Zoom/Pan this means that your picture will zoom and pan with your model. The first modelling technique I used when building my Tove was to lay out a series of circles over my reference sketch attach them into one spline object, adjust my circles to give the right profile and then apply a CrossSection modifier followed by a Surface modifier, this gives us our basic Tove torso. Next I created the basic back-leg shape by lofting two circles along a spline and then just used EditMesh to tweak in the leg detail. A low-poly(gon count) model is what we're after for Alice so as you can see I'm trying to describe the shape a simplistically as possible. Next for the front leg I started with a cylinder primitive and again used EditMesh to tweak. Next I put the Tove fuselage all together by mirroring across a clone each for his front and back legs, attached them all to the torso and them welded them on using Weld Target. Then we come to the nose and tail that I talked about, those where created using a simple, four-sided cone primitive to which I applied a Twist modifier with the cones pivot point off-centre so as to create a sort of corkscrew shape which I welded on using the same method as the legs. Finally I dove into EditMesh again for a last good tweek around adjusting a few vertices here giving him a couple of ears there and so on. So that's our basic Tove model built the next step is to texture our creature giving him a decent pelt and really bringing him to life and that we'll do in the next journorial! Modeling: Old-School UV Mapping Category:Modelling Category:Tutorials